“Miles of flint and good oak fencing, an estate saw mill, a deer park, a lake, then a well-conditioned red-brick model Victorian village with a Georgian House (probably for the agent), a stone rectory by P C Hardwick in mid-Victorian Tudor, a school, a big walled garden with acres of glass, a well-kept drive swirling past exotic firs and rhododendrons to a spired church, and finally an enormous stone house...” was the description of Englefield by John Betjeman and John Piper in their 1949 edition of Murray’s Berkshire Architectural Guide. It was, they went onto say, “the last of its kind in the county and worth seeing as a compact, well-run example of benevolent private ownership...”. In the same year, in The Berkshire Architectural Guide, he comments on the “…overwhelming and firmly established atmosphere of the great country house of Trollope’s novels, which continued into good King Edward’s reign.", and Leslie North writing in the Reading Chronicle of August 1980 described his approach to the village: “…I felt – if not exactly unreal – as if stepping into something retreated from an unacceptable present.”.

Englefield was a rare survival by the middle of the 20th century, how much rarer is it 70 years later: still an intact and functioning estate village with its school, its church, its shop, its social club, all well patronised, and the great house still lived in by the squire. There is no safari park, no swarm of visitors trooping round a great house frozen as a snapshot in time and no corporate away-days. It is true that the post office service was withdrawn in 2008, the church, school, shop with its tea room, and club all draw a large proportion of their support from outside the village and the big walled garden is now a garden centre; but never mind, it endures. It is true, too, that the traffic in the village street generated by these attractions is somewhat disconcerting to those who remember the village in earlier times but still it is a mere fraction of what it would have been had Englefield remained at the end of the 19th century as it had started it: on a junction of two busy through routes.

Englefield has its origin as a Saxon (or earlier) hamlet and has survived by being continually, but sensitively, renewed. Most of what is seen today goes no further back than the 19th century with one or two bits from the 18th; even Englefield House and the church, although of Elizabethan and Norman origin respectively, are not much more than 160 years old in their present appearance. Some new housing has been built in the later 20th century, but of an appropriate scale and design and tastefully blended into what was there before. In contrast, only the year before his description of Englefield in Murray's Berkshire, in his chapter on the county in The English Counties Illustrated, Betjeman was appalled by “...the council houses which mutilate almost every village...[that] are generally considered to be amongst the most ill-sited, disproportioned, inharmonious and badly built houses in England [and] provide a glaring contrast with their surroundings.”.

All of this was principally the creation of two successive owners who divided the 19th century almost exactly between themselves and oversaw the building of most of what is there today and, in the nick of time, the creation of new roads to take away the through traffic and allow that "retreat from an unacceptable present". Their creation has been well served by further generations of the same (somewhat loosely related) family so that Betjeman, who clearly thought Englefield to be an exception to the rule at the mid-point of the 20th century would, one feels, see no reason to change his mind were he to visit again today.